Enoch receives a premonition of disaster, so he sets out to collect as many books as he can find, to preserve the knowledge of the world. But, lacking reliable divine guidance, all his careful preparations come down to a straight-ahead, all-or-nothing gamble….

This is a story about a little bird who claims to be able to predict the future. Don’t trust him.

The Little Bird of Disaster was developed at The Kitchen’s 2003 summer workshop. The speaking characters are real-time “video puppets,” controlled with Mark Coniglio’s Isadora software. The piece was actually performed, like they say, in front of a live studio audience (you can hear them in the background).

I’d seen pictures of it before, but an especially dramatic photograph caught my eye on a magazine cover in the grocery store. It almost looked like another vegetable: a brilliant marigold-orange “fuel-air” bomb, the most powerful non-nuclear weapon on the market.

In this adaptation of an early Kafka story, a soldier is taken prisoner in the night by a pack of jackals. Offering a pair of scissors, they demand that he use the makeshift weapon to kill his sleeping friends. They overwhelm his initial, shocked refusal. Slowly, incredibly, he begins to see their point of view. He takes the scissors, and…